Major telecommunications service providers and system vendors, began installing fiber optics to home architectures in the 1990s. This addition of fiber optic cabling into telecommunications added yet another communication medium to the telecommunications industry. More particularly, fiber optics (or ‘fiber’) was added in addition to standard coaxial (or ‘coax’) cabling. Category 5 (or CAT5) cabling was also introduced into the telecommunications industry as an alternative to traditional coax.
Many homes and apartments, probably 85-90% of any dwellings today, are wired with coax because the cable television companies and contractors pre-wired most all dwellings in the beginning. However, with the addition of fiber, when companies bring fiber into a dwelling it becomes inefficient and costly to rewire every room in a home with the fiber infrastructure.
To address this issue, companies often employ desktop ONTs (optical network terminals). The desktop ONTs allow service providers to deliver true fiber to the home, e.g., in an MDU (multiple dwelling unit), without a need to install an industrial looking hardware units inside the home. The desktop ONT converts the optical signal to an analog signal that can be transitioned on coax within the home or MDU.
Thus, fiber can enter the home from the outside and be connected to the desktop ONT, which has an output of coax. The coax is usually fed back out of the dwelling, into an exposed splitter and through the rest of the dwelling. One dilemma is that in many cases a coax splitter is needed to transition throughout the dwelling. In many instances, the splitter is merely hung from the outside wall at the point of connection so as to effect the distribution. This is unsightly and sometimes conflicts with housing code.
A similar situation can happen with CAT5 and other types of cabling. Thus, there is a need in the art to provide a versatile and adaptable connection enclosure (ACE) that can be used in a variety of cabling connection scenarios.